The invention relates to a device as disclosed in the introductory part of Claim 1.
For example, in optical bus systems the users of the bus are switched to a standby mode so as to reduce the power consumption. Nevertheless, in this state power is still required, for example in order to maintain the receiver of the individual users in the standby state. This minimized power consumption may still be too high for given applications, because the users are often battery powered. Thus, a reduction of the power consumption would prolong the availability of the battery-powered users and also enable a reduction of the battery size and the weight.
The article "Call-by-Call Activation Technique for Fiber-Optic Subscriber Transmission Units" in IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. COM-35, No. 12, December 1987, pp. 1297 to 1302, describes an optical transmission system in which the components receive a voltage only during the data transmission. In the absence of data transmission, only a few components, inter alia including the optical receiver, continuously receive a voltage. This supply voltage is provided by batteries. A reduction of the power consumption would minimize the batteries and hence the weight.